How to play a music file in an Impress Presentation

How do you insert a music file in a LibreOffice Impress Presentation slide, so that it will play automatically when that slide is “presented”? Or better yet, how do you insert a digital music file in an Impress Presentation so that it will play (and auto-repeat as necessary) during the entire Presentation?

You may find it useful to read the post ‘audio file fails to launch when copied to another computer’ July 11, 2019, that I participated in. With your Impress presentation open, open the slide transition box on the right side of the screen.
Toward the bottom of that box, see “modify transition”, and under that “sound”. Toward the right side of the box next to sound it probably reads ‘no sound’, and to the right of that should be a down arrow. If you don’t see that down arrow, grab the edge of the large box and open it up wider. Click on that down arrow, and you get a dropdown box. Near the top of that box, third item on my machine, is “OTHER SOUND”. Click on this, which opens another box in which you select the audio file you want to insert. Once you have selected the audio file you want to insert, and that filename appears in the filename box, click on Open and that same filename will appear in the box next to sound under modify transition. I generally save after doing this. You can change the timing, delay when the sound commences, etc. I experienced difficulty when trying to use MP3 files, so changed format to WAV, a Microsoft format, and that worked. Notakwanon

Please use links when you refer to some other page. It would be uncomfortable for user to search for some topic name. Thanks!

Thank you very much for the well-written and thorough solution. I appreciate it very much.

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The “Transitions” method works well to have sounds play across slide transitions. We use it to play recorded music and show slides with words or scores for singers, with a presenter changing slides as appropriate.

HOWEVER

  • The transition sound files are not stored in the document even if you leave “Link” unchecked, so transporting to another computer is a problem
  • Every sound file you ever add will show up in the “Sound” drop list. The only way I found to remove them was to replace the files in \AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\gallery with a set from a fresh installation of LibreOffice.
  • The “Sound” list shows only the name of the file, not including the extension. Impress let me select a .m4a file, but it can’t play m4a on my Windows PC. So I converted the file to .mp3. But I couldn’t add the mp3 version, because it had the same name as the .m4a. I ended up opening the odp file with 7zip and manually editing the XML to change the extension.
  • Saving the file in PPTX format loses the transition, as well as any “insert audio”

So works well enough for an individual, but not great for a team sharing documents